Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
-A feeble follow up to its forebear, the faults far exceed the virtues of this needless sequel.
Full Disclosure: I thoroughly enjoyed 2014’s Maleficent. It was a refreshingly original take on a classic tale. It was also the perfect role for Angelina Jolie at that stage in her career. It was dark, visually stunning, and had a great message that turned the “true love conquers all” trope on its head. It ended perfectly, and didn’t necessarily need a sequel. Nevertheless, I decided to check it out.
Review
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil was, to put it bluntly, lame as hell. It’s a shameless cash grab disguised as a high fantasy movie; but when a movie rakes in over $750 million (as 2014’s Maleficent did), a sequel is bound to pop up, whether it has artistic merit or not. In this case, it most assuredly does not. The first one had charm in spades. The sequel has almost none. The first one had a clear and consistent tone throughout, where this one can’t decide what it wants to be.
Maleficent was dark. It mixed Celtic horror and fairy tales with heavy themes not usually found in movies primarily aimed at children. It was almost biblical in its tale of a fall from grace and ultimate redemption. It dealt with paranoia, obsession, the cost of vengeance, regret, familial love over fleeting infatuation, and even rape. Mistress of Evil had dark(ish) moments, but they didn’t lend themselves to any overall theme. It rotated between comedy and action/adventure too often. It relied far too heavily on gags that just didn’t land, not least of all because they seemed so out of place in the world established by the first one. Maleficent had its funny moments here and there, but it didn’t have “gags”.
The three fairies served as charming comic relief in Maleficent. In the sequel, they’re reduced to cheap one-liners and they are annoying as hell.
I don’t know if the change in tone (and quality) came from the almighty powers-that-be at Disney wanting to lighten things up, or if was a directorial choice. (Maleficent director Robert Stromberg was replaced by Joachim Rønning here.) Considering it’s Disney we’re talking about, and nothing happens there without the approval of 500 people, I’m inclined to believe it was the former.
Writer extraordinaire Linda Woolverton (writer of the classic OG versions of Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, as well as Maleficent) returns, but she’s joined by two cowriters for the sequel. It’s clearly a case of having too many cooks in the kitchen. The story is directionless, meandering, and muddled. It’s bloated with subpar set pieces and far too many characters. When it comes to tentpole sequels, studios constantly fall into the trap of believing that bigger is better. They want more action, more visual effects, more villains, all at the expense of story.
There’s no emotional thread in Mistress of Evil to keep an adult audience invested in the story for its two hour runtime. Maleficent went out of its way to put character development first, then plot. Only after those two crucial aspects were finely-tuned did they focus on dressing it up in a visually engaging package. The sequel did the exact opposite, and it suffered greatly for it.
Spoilers Ahead
It’s hard to tell if this is the character forcing a smile, or the actress trying to convince herself that it was a good idea to reprise her role in this shit pile of a movie.
First off, Mistress of Evil has a huge villain problem. Michelle Pfeiffer does what she can in her role as Ingrith, Queen of Ulstead and Aurora’s (the returning Elle Fanning) soon to be mother-in-law, but she can only do so much with the lackluster material she’s given to work with. It’s all too obvious all too soon that her kindness towards Aurora is a facade; a ploy to draw Maleficent and her fellow fairies into a race war. She has the least compelling and unoriginal motive imaginable for a villain: power for power’s sake. She’s agonizingly one-note, where King Stefan in Maleficent was a tortured and multi-layered villain.
Ingrith wants to kill the fairies because she sees them as a threat, even though there’s no evidence to support this claim. Since there’s no evidence, she just makes shit up and spreads lies through the kingdom to instill fear into her subjects. Her undyingly loyal lackey, Gerda, (Jenn Murray) is even more bloodthirsty and, as a consequence, even less interesting than Ingrith. Gerda’s lust for fairy death is so unbelievably stupid that it looks like she orgasms every time she kills one. This is especially evident during the ridiculous scene where she plays an organ that shoots poison at the fairies. By the look on her face, that seat will need a thorough wipe down later. She’s soaked right through her knickers.
She may look uptight, but this chick definitely knows how to get herself off.
The awkward, Meet the Parents-style dinner between Aurora’s family and Prince Phillip’s was the only time the movie managed to elicit a chuckle from me. Seeing the ever prickly and untrusting Maleficent attempt to be cordial with humans and have a “normal” family dinner was fun to watch. Unfortunately for both the characters and the story, it’s all downhill from there. Maleficent is framed by Ingrith for the attempted murder of the king, and the race war is on.
After a long series of events (which I’m sure you’ll thank me for not boring you with here), comes the inevitable massive battle between humans and fairies. While the battle itself was actually pretty dope, I was so emotionally checked out by then that I didn’t care about the fate of the characters involved. To that point, the “death” of Maleficent was extremely underwhelming. I didn’t believe for a single moment that they’d kill off the titular character so easily. Plus, the story of the phoenix rising from the ashes was so telegraphed earlier and so shoehorned in that it was nearly impossible to fail to see her resurrection coming from ten miles away.
After the defeat of the evil queen and a tentative peace between humans and fairies is brokered by Aurora and Phillip, the moral of the story is finally revealed in excruciatingly ham-fisted fashion. It’s as tired and lazy as the rest of the movie. No matter race, creed, color, size, or varying degrees of magical powers, we’re all the same. Peace is always better than war, and despite our disagreements, we’re not so different after all. Fuck off with that shit. The themes and messages of Maleficent were so original and cool, and this was the antithesis of that. They mailed it in here, but considering Maleficent: Mistress of Evil is still on track to make about a half billion dollars, I won’t be the least bit surprised to learn that a third one is in the works sooner rather than later.
Begone, foul temptress! Your feeble attempts to bewitch me by trying to be sexy evil cannot make up for this loathsome fairy tale!
5 Quick Hits
Chiwetel Ejiofor is an amazing actor, but his talents were utterly wasted in this movie. He serves as a kind of spirit guide/mentor to Maleficent, but it’s all generic “follow your heart” and “you’re the chosen one” bullshit. His weird and confusing death scene has no real impact on the story, and he doesn’t tell Maleficent anything that she wouldn’t have eventually figured out for herself.
The blue fairy didn’t get much of a sendoff considering she martyred herself to save her kinfolk from extermination at the hands of the organ of death. But is she really dead? I was utterly confused at the end when the other two fairies had a potted blue flower beside them. Do fairies resurrect and bloom from plants, or is the blue fairy just doomed to be a sentient flower now?
I got some hardcore Red Wedding vibes from the scene where Gerda tries to exterminate the fairies that have congregated for Aurora’s wedding. Unfortunately for Gerda, they don’t have HBO in her kingdom. If they did, and had she watched Game of Thrones, she’d have known that a few well-placed crossbow bolts are far more effective than an elaborate killer organ.
It always gladdens my heart to see Warwick Davis get some quality screen time. The world’s second-most renowned dwarf actor (looking at you, Dinklage) has a prominent role in this movie and actually has the best and most complete character arc in the whole damn thing.
Maleficent turning Ingrith in to a goat at the end was played for laughs, but in my opinion, it seems a pretty mild punishment for attempted genocide.
